Google Collections gets some unsuspected love with the release of Google’s AI Search integration

Love it or hate it, Google Collections, Google’s content curation tool that’s kind of but sort of not meant to replace bookmarks is still alive and kicking. As I’ve covered a bunch in the past, Collections lets you save recipes, Maps locations, Travel trips, images, shopping products and pretty much anything else across the company’s information ecosystem with one click for recall at a later date.

While we all initially thought it would die off faster than the previous efforts to upend classic bookmarking systems, they’ve stuck around, and have instead become a layer over top of the traditional, helping users better organize their data, and placing it where it’s most useful instead of in a great bit pool where it’s rarely ever referenced again.

Anyway, now that anyone with a 2TB+ Google One subscription who is also signed up for the Search Generative Experience (SGE) Labs preview can now toggle and use the tech giant’s Bing AI-style chat bot right inside of Google Search, something interesting and unexpected popped up.

If you visit the Labs icon at the top right of Search and select the extra options, namely the “Add to Sheets” toggle and return to your web query, you’ll notice while hovering over a result with your mouse, there is a new left-aligned floating smart chip.

In this, there’s an ‘Add to Google Sheets’ icon, of course, but also a direct ‘Share’ button. However, that’s not the most exciting thing in my opinion. Google is also testing out an add to Google Collections bookmark icon as the first icon in the row of three, letting you quickly save things for later!

Why is this significant, you ask? Because up until now, you’d have to be on, well, any other Google Search result type other than ‘Web’ in order to bookmark things to Collections. For some reason or another, you were never able to easily add web links to a Collection for later use without clicking the three dots ‘more’ options menu to the right of that result to call up the ‘About this result’ overlay.

While not a huge feature or focus for SGE, having this available one click away instead of two or three is nice for Collections users like me. Before Reading List came to the Chrome Side Panel, I often added websites to a Collection called ‘Read later’ (though I wish we had a list view instead of thumbnails!).

I may be one of the only ones to care, but I certainly hope Collections continue to get more integration and that others begin to use it to curate their data. This tool can help you bookmark less into your endless jumble of links and start to ‘save‘ things where they will be most useful and actionable!